PHEIs as New Alternatives for Students in Ethiopia: The Case of Distance Education Provision at St. Mary's College

Abstract

The widespread emergence and development of Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) in Ethiopia is a recent phenomenon. Among other things, this is the result of the fact that government higher education institutions alone could not absorb the high educational demand from the society. Many countries of the world, both developed and developing, have never been successful in responding to the educational demand of the public through conventional institutions alone-institutions established on the basis of the customary classroom teacher-student interactions mode. Their educational history shows that they are extensively using other alternatives chief among which is the introduction of distance mode of education into their educational system. Distance Education in Ethiopia, is gaining momentum with the appearance of PHEIs in the country. This paper tries to show Distance Education (DE) as an alternative mode of teaching and learning in creating access, flexibility and cost effectiveness, and suggests possible ways of exploiting it for the purpose of academic delivery. The paper focuses, mainly, on distance education provision at St. Mary’s College. A method of descriptive statistics (tabulation and percentage values) was applied to analyze the data collected from the application forms of 206 distance learners (half of the Megabit 1994 E.C. intake) of St. Mary's College. The findings of the study show that DE is really accessible, flexible, and cost-effective to diverse types of learners in Ethiopia, at least in reference to the provision of the mode at St. Mary's College, more than the conventional mode of education.